Andrew Lawrence's Reading List

"Yes, it is, and I will come on to Brian May in a moment. This is actually the book which least demonstrates the starting speech I just gave. It is a straightforward astronomy book which is really good. Mostly I choose it because I thought I have to have something by Patrick Moore for myself and for all the other working astronomers who started life as kids reading his books. Somewhere in the 1960s I had The Observer’s Book of Astronomy by Patrick Moore. He really is an institution – a national treasure. I don’t know! He is a fairly weird guy. I wouldn’t go with his politics, but he is very colourful. He is very straightforward. He knows the science but he is really an amateur astronomer. So he has always presented astronomy in a very concrete way to the public. It is about saying, anybody can look at the sky and here it is. He did it in this eccentric British way, which is very captivating. Also, he has always felt to the public like one of them. There are hundreds of books by him, but I went for this one because it is so good and colourful. It has a mixture of history and science and maps of the sky and all sorts of things. Brian is a lovely success story because he started doing a PhD in astronomy at Imperial College back in the 1970s but then he had this other life with the pop group Queen and eventually when Queen took off he gave up his PhD. Yes, and he actually finished his PhD after all that time, which is unprecedented. He was supervised by an old friend of mine, Michael Rowan-Robinson, and it was a very good piece of work. Chris Lintott, the third of the three authors of Bang! is different again. He is a professional astronomer who works a lot with Patrick. They are three very different people – a colourful 80s rock star, an eccentric British amateur astronomer and a regular working astronomer – so they are a bit of a dream team. This is a much more controversial subject than the Big Bang. It has not been clear for many years whether the universe keeps expanding and getting bigger and bigger and will endure a slow cold death over an infinite period of time or whether the universe will stop expanding and collapse, so that you get a big crunch and then it all starts again. This has been a controversy throughout my whole career."

"I thought it would be nice to have something that isn’t just grand theories and armchair stuff, but something that is really helpful. It is a kind of field guide – the amateur astronomer’s bible. Professional astronomers like it too. It is a little bit like an ordnance survey map of astronomy. People love it for the same reason, because it is both practical and beautiful. It has got maps of the sky and useful information about how to do your observing and so on. The maps are just beautifully done. They are incredibly clear so people love staring at them in the same way that many people love staring at ordnance survey maps. Yes, it started many, many years ago but in 2003 Ian Ridpath overhauled it and brought it up to date and did a lovely job of it. Very occasionally. I have been on telescopes where everything is working fine and then something goes wrong – for example, there is a power cut and all the computers go. So you have to get the telescope knowing where it’s pointing again. Absolutely. And you think, Oh God, I have to get out Norton’s Star Atlas , point the telescope at Alpha Boo and start again!"

"It is popular science and journalism and history all rolled into one, and very nicely done. Dennis Overbye trailed real working astronomers for a couple of years. He went to the conferences and went up and down the corridors and buttonholed people. He also dug into the history. So it starts early in the 20th century and stops at around 1990. Yes, if you want to know how astronomy really works then this is a book you should read. It is warts and all. It has got competing personalities. For example, a lot of the book is about the so-called Hubble Wars. Hubble was the guy who found the universe was expanding. The number that tells us the rate of expansion is called Hubble’s Constant. But measuring that rate exactly is very, very hard. It took a number of decades to get it really right. Now we pretty much have it nailed so no one argues about it any more, but they certainly did then. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter From 1950 to 1990 there were two warring camps. One bunch of people was led by Allan Sandage, who said the Hubble Constant is 50km per second per megaparsec , plus or minus five. Another camp, led mostly by Gérard de Vaucouleurs, said it is 90, plus or minus five. So they didn’t even overlap. You were either in one camp or another or stood in the middle, going, “What the hell is going on, can’t we sort this out?” It took a long time to figure out what the problems were. The number we now believe is pretty much in between the two – about 73. But the leaders of both camps were both very determined personalities and they had young followers who learnt at their feet. But for me, science is not just obstinacy and fashion. It is driven by the passion to know the truth. The facts are out there and eventually it gets sorted out. This is the most extreme example in astronomy in the history of the 20th century of clashing personalities in the so-called Hubble Wars. There are always miniature versions of that going on."

"Richard Feynman is a hero of every physicist. Until quite late in his life he was only known by physicists and wasn’t a public figure at all. That changed in the 1980s when he started writing popular books. He was a very fun and colourful character. Yes, he certainly did. There was very much this image of him as this straight-talking man from Queens who wasn’t interested in the fashions of science and would do his own thing in his own blunt way. I discovered from this book that his image of “I am a straightforward man” wasn’t that simple, because actually he did have quite a big ego. Also, there was this very interesting arc to his personal life. As a very young man, his wife, whom he was devoted to, died young. After that he went slightly off the rails and turned into this womaniser, chatting up inappropriate women at the bars of the various conferences he attended. So he became almost as notorious for his personal life as he was for science, and then he met another woman who straightened him out in the classic fashion. For the next part of his life he stopped being so unsettled and became this sort of folk hero, did all the bongo playing, and discovered the throat voice singers and all that kind of fun stuff that people know about. It is a lovely book, which I was very pleased by. Lawrence Krauss is quite a well-known populariser but I had never been very fond of his books. He had written a thing about the science of Star Trek and I thought it was a bit gimmicky. But this book isn’t like that. It is very straightforward and beautifully written. If you want to know what it is like inside the skull of a physicist it is a very good book to read."

"This is a history book, but about the history of science. It was an eye opener to me because I thought I knew about Arabic science and I didn’t. The story that most scientists will tell you is, “First there were the Greeks who did these wonderful things, and then later on there was the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. In between the Arabs and Islam held the torch.” The picture you get is that they kept the knowledge alive between Aristotle and Newton as it were and passed the torch down by transmitting what the Greeks had done. Yes, they were doing much more original things than most people think. In that standard picture of them passing the knowledge down, you usually hear about the Moors in Andalusia in Spain in the 12th century. That was indeed an important transmission point because that is the way a lot of knowledge got into Europe from Africa. But, actually, the really original scientific things in the Islamic world happened in Baghdad in the ninth century. A very wide range of things. They did original things in astronomy, in algebra and in medicine. They did a lot of things that the Greeks certainly did not do and which were not re-discovered until much later in Europe. There was someone who proposed the circulation of the blood, pretty much the same way [William] Harvey did, and there was an Arabic astronomer who proposed the heliocentric theory. They did amazing work in optics. It was clear that a number of them followed methods that we would recognise in modern times in a way that the Greeks did not. The Greeks were much more about armchair science. So this is a whole area of history that most Westerners don’t know too much about. It is because of this idea that somehow you understand knowledge better when you know where it has come from. It seems odd, because you may think the truth about the universe is the truth about the universe, but somehow, personally, I find it easier to understand if I follow the historical flow. I do this with my own work as well, over a smaller time scale. Some of my younger colleagues will just read the latest papers on something, but sometimes I just find them puzzling and I have to go back and work out how the scientists got to that point. October 14, 2012. Updated: May 11, 2022 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected] Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount ."